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I feel like writing about #ADHD a bit because today is maybe the 4th ever day that I've taken my full dose of meds, because I told myself I didn't need the third pill and whoo boy was I wrong. 
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And it fuckin' kills me that I'm 7 months into actually taking medication and still second guessing that whether or not I need it. Whether or not I am actually #ADHD or "just lazy" 2/?
This has been a thing my whole adult life though, so I guess it's not surprising. I was first diagnosed as ADD when I was 15yo I went in for a full psych eval because I had a huge discrepancy in my math and reading PSAT scores and my teachers raised concerns. 3/?
My parents dutifully took me in for testing and believed and acted on everything in the report - super smart, disability in math and punctuation, needs extended time - EXCEPT the ADD part and the scrip for Ritalin. Why? Lots of reasons. 4/?
"They're diagnosing everyone with ADD these days." "You can sit and read for hours." "You can sit and crochet a hat in one go!" "You're not doing that bad in school." And the one that I personally bought into, "You're nothing like Adam, now that's a kid with ADD." 5/?
His name wasn't Adam, but I'm changing it cause I don't have his permission and who cares anyway. It doesn't matter who he was, we all have an Adam in our heads. That one kid who was absolutely off the walls bouncy, talking about something new every five seconds. ADD KID. 6/?
He was the poster child for what our society thinks it means to be #ADHD & through no fault of his own, he's the reason a lot of us go undiagnosed or unmedicated for most of our lives. I say he because that version of ADHD is more common in guys. 7/?
Because of Adam & his brethren I believed my parents when they said that part of my diagnosis had to be wrong. I didn't question why they had accepted everything else about my brain being weird but not that. I can't ask them any more, but if I had to guess the answer is meds. 8/?
I saw what I knew a person w/ #ADHD looked like and didn't question that it wasn't me. That the freaking psychologists who had diagnosed me might know more about it than my mom & dad. That it might be more about stigma than about science. I was 15. I didn't know shit. 9/?
Fast forward 22 years and I had made it through 3 years of HS, 4 years of college, 10 years of teaching and 5 years of writing and publishing books without any meds. So it was only whrn the sky fell on my head that I realized there was a problem. 10/?
In June of 2020 I lost both my parents & between the pandemic, caring for a 3yo, & grief, I was totally unable to cope. Everything I'd done to get by for 22 years stopped working. It was all too much. I was having anxiety attacks, I was depressed, I felt like I was drowning 11/?
Luckily, for my sake, I had also been following @UrsulaV on Twitter for a year or so at that point. And I had just watched her go through the process of diagnosis and trying #ADHD meds as an adult. 12/?
Honestly, if it it hadn't been for her talking so openly about how her brain works, or doesn't, I don't know if would ever have come to terms with my own #ADHD. She said so many things where I thought, "That's me. She's describing me. That's exactly what my brain does." 13/?
And confronted with that much evidence I finally had to acknowledge the truth. 22 years late, but better than never. So a week or two after my parents died I finally called my doctor and got a prescription for meds. We've been working out the right dosage for a while now. 14/?
And we'd bumped me up to a third pill two months ago, but I haven't been good about taking it because in trying to space them out I kept forgetting and then I decided maybe I didn't need it anyway. 15/?
Why'd I decide that you ask? Oh no reason. Just 22 years of being convinced this whole thing is in my imagination rearing its ugly head again. But DAMN IT. Today I've walked the dog & made bread, done some admin work, & written a giant 
thread, & still have time to write! 16/?
thread, & still have time to write! 16/?
And that may not sound like much to you if but it's not something I can do on zero meds or even 2/3 meds and I need to fucking accept that I need help with this. I've been playing in "hard" mode too long. Fuck that. I want easy mode. So huge thanks to @UrsulaV for her openness.
If this thread helps even one person the way her threads about #ADHD helped me then I will consider it a massive win. Also, y'all should buy all her books they are excellent. Not that she needs me to shill them, but still. So good. /*fin*
